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COGNITIO: Revista de Filosofia
ISSN 1518-7187
Indexação: The Philosopher`s Index; Citas Latinoamericanas en Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades (CLASE)
Banco de Traduções
Tradução de artigo publicado no número 2 – novembro de 2001
PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM: BERGSON AS A READER OF WILLIAM JAMES
Prof. Dr. Franklin Leopoldo e Silva
Departamento de Filosofia – USP
Original in Portuguese.
[tr. to English by Rodrigo Brandão]
The followers of the structuralist method in the History of Philosophy are accustomed to say that philosophers are not good historians, for they cannot read and understand other authors without projecting onto them their own ideas. Thus, accepting or denying other philosophies, what the philosopher actually does is a kind of experience of his own thought through other’s. Something further than an objective analysis of the doctrine that he is concerned to. As if the other author’s ideas were just a pretext or a reference to the articulation of their own conceptions. This consideration could initially work as a standard of moderation of the enthusiastic admiration that Bergson had for William James. In fact, if the Bergson´s role in his age was that of reinstate the possibility of metaphysics in the French philosophy, denied by the positivism and by the neo-Kantian epistemologists, how he could accept the declared admiration of James for the positivism and for the utilitarianism? How to admit the compatibility between a philosophy that conceives the time as Absolute and the intuition as a contact with an unspeakable totality and an epistemology that links the truth to the evolution of the human practice in its relation to the things? Yet the claims that Bergson made about the philosophical rightness of the pragmatism are not just eloquent. But the accounts of his approximations are more meaningful when- explaining the ideas of the American philosopher - he displays his own ideas. Only a deep comparative study could rigorously trace the similarities and the differences. Here we will be satisfied with a brief view of the Bergsonian account of the philosophy of William James. To do this we attempt to focus on specific points where the rapport comes up, chiefly grounded on the interpretative reading of James’s works that Bergson did.
Lets initially approach the general question of the relation between thought and reality.
“ We would misunderstand the pragmatism of James if we do not begin by changing the idea that we have about reality generally. We talk about ‘world’ or about ‘cosmos’; and these words, according to their origins, mean something simple or something composed. We say ‘universe’ and the word makes one think of a possible unification of things. We may be spiritualists, materialists, pantheists as we can be indifferent to philosophy and satisfied with the common sense: we always represent to ourselves several simple principles by which we could explain the conjoint of material and moral things. (...) Reality, as James sees it, is redundant and superabundant. (...) It is far from this dry universe that the philosophers compound with well-cut and well-arranged elements, in which each part is not just linked to each other, as experience says, but also as our reason would like it to be, co-ordinate to the Whole.”[1]
We can notice in this text that, according to Bergson, the philosophy of William James is characterised by a refusal of a system of reality. The simplicity, the simple orderliness, the perfect and accomplished co-ordination, the unity that arises from its totality. The elements that make up the traditional notion of the cosmos are more exigencies of our intellect than attributes of reality. Beyond the links that the experience provides, we project into reality what our reason would like it to be, and this is a rewarding rationality because it fulfils with actual contents the intellectual categories that gives functionality to both the philosophical thought and the common sense. Our representation frames the reality, forms a picture in which the simplicity and the necessity stands out in a way that it encourages the unitary and fundamentally homogeneous images that the tradition built in its attempts to understand the world. We could remember now the Leibnizian idea of simplicity of means and complexity of ends, a sort of law obeyed by the divine rationality in the building of an absolute co-ordinate universe. Opposed to this is, according to Bergson, the James’s conception of reality as “redundant and superabundant”, of which our intellectual representation would be a shrunk version, to not say an impoverished one. What explains the difference between James and the tradition is the value which each one grants to two aspects that are in Bergson´s description: the parts linked to each other and the elements co-ordinate to the Whole. The one is present in our immediate contact with the things; the other is derived from an exigency or from a desire of our reason. The universe seems to James to be an indefinible plurality of parts linked to each other and this constitutes our experience. This experience conveys us nothing about a unity that could rule this plurality or about a totality to which every elements would be co-ordinated to form a coherent system, either finite or infinite. Hence in this redundant superabundance that the praxis displays we do not have means of asserting the necessity of each elements or the strict determination of each relation. When we do it, we do suppose a totality and a unity that would rule the experience and would structure it a priori.
The rationalist tradition thinks that the reality structured by a priori principles is superior and richer than an indefinable plurality. James, on the other hand, thinks that this theoretical attitude actually impoverishes the experience, for it takes away from experience the novelty, the unpredictability, the creation of forms, finally the openness of its character. The idea of system confines the reality in the intellectual pictures that we use to understand it. The very root of the James’s pragmatism is a resolutely anti-dogmatic attitude that is expressed in all the accompaniment of the lines of experience, without categorical suppositions that could bind the flux of reality. This attitude is to James the radical empiricism.
“Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concretenesss and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth.”[2]
The pragmatism is not a novelty. It relies on the empiricist attitude, which, however, had realised it imperfectly. To dissolve the inherent contradictions of the traditional empiricism, it is, therefore, to radicalise the empiricist attitude. Turning away from abstraction in philosophy, the tendency of immediately linking the use of words to the knowledge of things. The totalling pretence and others “inveterate habits” that result in dogmatism and artificiality. It would be enough to remember that the book “The Immediate data of Consciousness” aims at a knowledge devoid of the metaphysical and methodological supposition that were traditionally constituted, and which stand between the philosopher and the reality. This impede him of immediately reaching the date, here, the conscience in its spontaneous, continuous and heterogeneous flux of essentially temporal existence. The one that psychology, following the traditional paradigms of knowledge, put into a formal picture of discontinual elements of spatial character and as though they were ready to be apprehended by an analytical and conceptual procedure.
The Bergson´s opposition to the traditional pattern of knowledge is the criticism of the conceptual abstraction, which moves round the object in a multiple external points of view, without ever reaching its hardcore. Something that would just be possible through an experience that abandons the assumptions of conceptual analyses, in its definition something not fit to apprehend the moving continuity that constitutes the fabric of reality. “for [the concept] substitutes the actual and internal organisation of something for an external and schematic reconstitution.” [3]
The Bergsonian criticism includes, however, the comprehension of the cause by which such procedures of knowledge were exclusively emphasised in the history of thought. It is the theme concerned to the genesis of intelligence in the context of the theory of evolution. Along the development of beings, a primitively impulse divided in two directions, formed two distinct instruments for survival of species: the instinct of the animal and the intelligence in man. Thus it is, because of its own origins, pragmatic, in the sense that it is the satisfaction of the necessities of life. The structure of reality is, therefore, patterned after utilitarian criterions, forasmuch the assuring of the means of survival is its first function. Thenceforth the parallelism with the instinct, that does not have, however, the flexibility that characterises the intelligence, which does not pattern after any skill fixed by nature, but by a wide range of possibilities, all of them, however, with a character originally instrumental. Whilst the instinct is itself an instrument for survival, the serious intelligence, Bergson says, is an instrument to make instruments, and is this characteristic of making instruments that is responsible for the variety and mutability of which man uses to dominate the nature to his own benefit.
Here two things are meant: firstly the categories of intelligence are linked to a pragmatical feature. Secondly, the interpretation of reality that such categories provides us, being also consequently linked to the praxis, results in a cut of reality that guides itself by criterions of domination and utilisation of things. The intellectual knowledge, therefore, is derived from this cut done by these categories, is a representation that the conscience does when it pragmatically aims at the world. So knowledge, therefore, is strictly linked to action: is for the asking of the practices of survival, which involves both the primitive relation to the world, concerned to an instrumentally still rough, and the scientifical theories more sophisticated and apparently far from the realm of practice. Bergson thinks that this is a difference of degree, due to the possibility of intelligence of progressively develop to relations with the real that are gradually more complex. Thus there is a practical limitation of the intellectual categories. It is to this limitation that Bergson attributes the preponderance of certain notions, such as simplicity, stability, unity, necessity, and others, since that in all of them one can notice the work of the intelligence to make the reality understandable, chiefly making it accessible. It is significant that Bergson refers to this character of intelligence to explain, in its regards of James, the intellectual relation between thought and reality.
“Our intelligence loves the simplicity. It saves effort, and wants that the nature is organised after a fashion that would demand from us the least work account. It uses just the strictly necessary in the elements or the principles to recompose with them the indefinable series of objects and events.”[4]
In other words, the systematic character of reality, including the entire exigency to its intellectual comprehension, comes from intelligence or from techno-practical rationality that is projected into the world by it. To know and to act are inseparably joined, the knowledge is, as it were, subordinated to the prerogatives of action. In this sense the truth is what is fitted to the enacting of some necessary actions for survival, in the wide sense that we already have mentioned. It means that, in a large extent, our experience of reality, instead of providing aid to the conceptual image of the world, is subordinated to the structure of intelligence, with its analytical-conceptual character. Our experience of reality is conditioned by mechanisms of articulation that shape the real to the discursiveness of the intelligence. From it derives a sort of harmony that we accustomed to realise, at least since Aristotle, between reality and an intelligible structure that seems to be very fit to, so “immanent” to the things . The representation of reality relies on this adequacy, with its variants common to the several theoretical systems of knowledge, including from the Aristotelian objectivism to the Kant´s transcendental subjectivity. Is in this pragmatical tendency of the intelligence that relies, in a deeper way than the relativists had understood, the relativity of the human knowledge. Hence the pragmatist sense of relativity of the human knowledge, such as it was held by James, is not too far from this Bersgsonian conception.
“But as the sciences have developed farther, the notion has gained ground that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations. The laws themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is no counting them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the branches of science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one them may from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man made language, a conceptual shorthand, as some one calls them, in which we write our reports of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects.”[5]
As science is a well-made language, we should consider it as a symbolic transcript of reality. The relativity is as present in the lexicon of the elements as in the grammar that articulates these elements. We cannot estimate the actual correspondence between the symbol and what is symbolised; for we somehow impose to reality the way we prefer to transcript it. This background of arbitrariness is balanced by the utility of the theories regarding the possibility of articulating the facts and enabling the new ones to be grouped. Owing a structure within which the experience is connected, that is, within which the facts are linked to each other, we have, therefore, an adequate code to refer to reality. Thus we can say that we have a group of “ideas” about reality. Yet all of them come from experience and are conjugated in experience, “linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving”; and this is what make them true. A true idea, James emphasises this, is always instrumentally true.
It is most glaring that this thesis raised a great deal of opposition, for it seemed to lead the relativism to its ultimate consequences. Bradley, for instance, claimed that, according to this thought, for any idea be a true idea would be enough to anyone consider it as such. Bergson, however, appraises the thesis of relativity because of its human construction of truth. Providing that it is well considered, it is more coherent than the theory of correspondence between representation and reality, mainly if we understand this correspondence as a copy. Is it possible to admit that our cognitive instrumental is a copy of reality? If we use this conception to the particular facts, we will have to solve the problem of the copying of the moving, for there is not any particular reality that is not subordinated to a continual alteration. If we take the general propositions as copies, we will have to point out what they copy and, since it could not be any particular fact, we would have to conclude that the general rules are not copies. Actually, the concordance is a rational aspiration – almost a regulatory idea in the Kantian sense. But to Bergson (who thinks to be in agreement with James on this) it is not even a possibility. It is a rationalised desire, due to an aspiration of reason of a safe degree of knowledge that could just be realised through a sort of coincidence between the subject and the reality, conceived within the logical stability of an “object”. The philosophy furthered this aspiration.
“There were to the ancient philosophers a world above time and space, where were, since eternity, all possible truths: the human statements would be truer the more faithfully they copied these eternal truths. The moderns made the truth go down towards earth, but they still see in it something that would pre-exist our statements. The truth would be placed in the things and in the facts: our science would search for this and would take it out of its hidden place, bringing it into light.”[6]
However, the truth is not waiting for us, “ as America was waiting for Christopher Columbus”; our statements about reality that create the truths about reality. It grants to knowledge more dignity, for the truth is no longer a discovery, it becomes an invention. An invention does not mean arbitrariness. As we have already said, the utility impedes the arbitrariness, for it gives to the pursuit of truth a goal; the addition in our dominion of things. The idea that the truth is originated in the act of knowledge has to be understood regarding the radical empiricism. Following the meanders of experience, in its indefinable plurality that characterises it, we prolong the dominion of the facts and its connections. Then the knowledge is defined as a process in which the most important realm is the future, since it is concerned to the movement of invention. The truth does not precede the human act of knowing it: is the knowledge itself that engenders the truth, the reason why we cannot expect any eternal truth or any system of intelligibility pre-existent to our contact with the world. Since the truth is practical, we invent it in so far we learn how to improve the use of reality. And since truth always coincides with the act of apprehending it, the construction of truth is also the construction of the means with which we apprehended it. Bergson thinks that the pragmatism of William James continues the critical philosophy of Kant and surpasses it. It is not just a general structure of our mind, in which the theoretical truth relies, but this structure is produced over the process of invention of truth. The man is not just responsible for the use of his rational structure, of his mind, but he also creates it within the freedom of knowledge.